Meet the Violent Anarchist Behind DHS’s ‘Pyramid of Far-Right Radicalization’ Scandal
Last week, the Media Research Center (MRC) published a report gleaned from Freedom of Information Act requests that shows how the Biden administration has weaponized the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to target political opponents. DHS provided $352,109 in grant funding to the University of Dayton’s PREVENTS-OH counter-extremism project. The grant application was based in part on the work of openly anarchist Antifa-affiliated Michael Loadenthal, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cincinnati who, by his own admission, is a far-left violent extremist.
In 2021, Loadenthal spoke at a “White Nationalism Workshop” and an “Extremism, Rhetoric and Democratic Precarity” roundtable at the University’s “Social Practice Of Human Rights Conference.” During the white nationalism workshop, Loadenthal introduced himself by stating that he is militant Antifa; he then continued his talk by teaching audience members how to securely dox people to their employers. He detailed how he uses a VPN, burner phones, encrypted communications, and “sock puppet” accounts to dox people.
Throughout the talk he framed his work in explicitly “antifascist” terms, explaining how he employs “antifascist intelligence” to dox individuals online and in real life. He detailed what “antifascists” do with that information: “We contact employers, landlords, commanding officers, school officials, family, clergy, and we pressure service providers [PayPal, GoFundMe, Patreon, Amazon etc.] … and people will kick people off.” When asked during the question-and-answer section how people can help his work, he stated, “Donate money … We have defense funds because we get into trouble. A lot of the things we’re doing are illegal … a lot of it involves breaking the law.”
Loadenthal’s talk is a naked attempt to launder Antifa tactics of online harassment, doxxing, deplatforming, and illegal activity to make them sound academic. The danger of mainstreaming these violent extremist tactics became glaringly obvious in Loadenthal’s second presentation at the conference.
His talk on “Extremism, Rhetoric, and Democratic Precarity” opened with an image entitled “The Pyramid of Far-Right Radicalization.” In it, he presented a taxonomy of the “far right,” which implies a pipeline from mainstream conservatism to violent extremist terrorism. He stated, “This is the modern far-right as articulated by what I think are some smart folk. We have a tiered system here between mainstream conservatism on the bottom, what is falsely called the ‘alt-lite,’ what used to be called the alt-right, which has been abandoned as a term, and when we look at the top, accelerationists and folks who are engaging in violence.” (Read more from “Meet the Violent Anarchist Behind DHS’s ‘Pyramid of Far-Right Radicalization’ Scandal” HERE)
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